Portable tech owes the system a lot, but how did we ever tolerate that screen?

Portable video gaming wasn't actually a new thing in 1989. Simple, single-game handheld electronic amusements, including Nintendo's own Game and Watch line, had been around since the mid-'70s, and the cartridge-based Milton Bradley Microvision actually beat Nintendo to market by a full decade. But they all became a historical footnote 25 years ago this week on April 21, 1989, when Nintendo released the original Game Boy in Japan.

A generation of tech-heads tapping away at their smartphone screens can probably be traced back to that first day when people were able to glance down at the four-color grayscale, 160×144 screen while on the go. The Game Boy had its competitors, some of which were much more technically capable, but a combination of better battery life, a cheaper price, and exclusive rights to mega-hit Tetris meant the Game Boy outlasted them all, to the tune of over 118 million units sold before the system was discontinued in 2003 (and that's not including the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance lines the original inspired).

In honor of this auspicious moment in the history of portable electronics, we decided to take a quick look back at our own memories of the original Game Boy.

Gaming Editor Kyle Orland

When my parents announced that we'd be spending a week of my 1990 summer vacation at a Caribbean resort, I was less excited than I should have been. That's because going to an island paradise meant leaving behind the Nintendo Entertainment System that I was probably a little bit too attached to, even as an eight-year-old. So when my parents surprised me days before the trip with a brand new Game Boy, complete with Super Mario Land, Alleyway, and a truly hideous carrying case, I was overjoyed.

My memories of that vacation mainly involve ignoring and/or sneaking away from supposedly fun activities like waterskiing, snorkeling, and trapeze lessons to sit by a nearly deserted pool and play on my Game Boy. I'm pretty sure my parents made me put the device down for meals and the seemingly mandatory after-dinner shows, but other than that, you could find me plugging away at Super Mario Land diligently, though I wouldn't manage to defeat final boss Tatanga until months later. Occasionally I'd be forced to take a cooling dip in the pool to escape from the blaring sun, but on the plus side, all that direct, natural light made it really easy to see what was going on on that streaky, non-backlit screen.

Looking back now, I'm a little bit regretful that I ignored a bounty of unique, location-specific activities and experiences on that vacation to dicker around on an electronic novelty. At the time, though, and for a while after, I'd have ranked it as one of the best vacations of my life.

Best-selling games for the original Game Boy (various sources): #1 - Tetris - 35 million copies.

#2 - Pokemon Red/Blue/Green - ~23.64 million

#3 - Super Mario Land - 18.06 million

#4 - Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins - 11.09 million

#5 - Pokemon Yellow - ~8.86 million

#6 - Kirby's Dream Land - ~5 million

#7 - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - ~3.83 million

#8 - Dr. Mario - 2.08 million (in Japan)

#9 - Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 - 1.59 million (in Japan)

#10 - Kirby's Dream Land 2 - 1.49 million (in Japan)

Culture Editor Casey Johnston

A handful of things about the Game Boy that, looking back, I find hard to believe:

1) I used to share this thing with at least two other siblings. These days, every kid has his or her own iPod—if not an iPad. I can't believe I actually found things to do while my brother played our Game Boy other than just sitting there and stewing in anger at him while waiting for his turn to be over. Remember turns? When childhood fun was a precious resource meted out by objects of limited interactivity? I believe I begged my parents for a competing Sega Game Gear just to be original. I imagine they laughed.

2) I played the first five or six levels of Super Mario Land several hundred times. And that was because you could not save. You could not save! The start screen even has a top-score field, bizarrely, which clears when you turn the Game Boy off (or drain its batteries).

Apparently it only takes around half an hour to get through the entire game. I would never have known that firsthand, because in the entire duration of my childhood, I never beat it. I did, however, start at the beginning over and over and over. With Mario, hope springs eternal. In part, I blame my losses on the irritating physics. I bet I never tried to finish it because I imagined the game to be infinitely long, so I was never really mad at myself for losing because I was bound to lose at some point anyway.

3) The screen to the Game Boy was not backlit. There were many accessories intended to "solve" this problem, but many of them were larger than the Game Boy itself.

I sometimes worry that staring at LCD screens all day for my job and recreational time is making me go blind. Going back to a Game Boy now, I'm surprised I didn't go blind long ago (my grasp of things that make one go blind is a bit tenuous). Either way, the screen is very dark, and I can't imagine how I ever played in places with less than full sunlight. This was the walk-uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow of my time.

Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson

For a few years in elementary school, the months were marked not by the turning of a calendar page but by the arrival of a new issue of Nintendo Power in my mailbox. As a rabid junior consumer of all things Nintendo, I devoured the magazine—it was like printed crack to my young mind. Its coverage of the Game Boy—and more specifically on its launch pack-in title, Tetris—drove me to madness with want and need. I had an NES, of course (because what preteen in the late '80s didn’t?), but the idea of being able to take my games with me on the bus to school or on a family trip was jaw-dropping. The Game Boy was just like a Sony Walkman... but for games!

Of course, at least in my school, kids who did bring Game Boys on the bus or into class quickly had them confiscated, but I didn’t care about any of that. I wanted one. I devoured every single word Nintendo Power published about the handheld, and I imagined how incredible Tetris must be. Without having seen anything of the game other than screenshots in the magazine, I made up elaborate rules for it in my head. I managed to overlook or miss the idea that Tetris was about making lines and instead built it up as this incredible game of shape-building, like interactive Lego, where you could create huge geometric constructs and then zoom around and through them in 3D space. The Game Boy and Tetris would be the most incredible thing I’d ever play, if only I could get my hands on it!

Reality, of course, never lives up to fantasy. The first time I actually got hold of a Game Boy at the local Babbage’s, I thought the sickly green LCD was broken or defective. Tetris had none of the amazing 3D zooming and sweeping I’d imagined in my head. That first encounter with the Game Boy killed my lust, and I never ended up owning one.

Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ An extremely damaged (but still working) Game Boy now on display at the Nintendo World store in New York City.

I actually found my old, first-generation Game Boy again recently, slowly yellowing in a box full of busted NES controllers and anonymous power adapters. The plastic screen is badly scratched. There's a line of dead pixels down the LCD. The Start button is nearly gone, and the back is covered in a red residue (the latch for the battery cover broke off once upon a time, and Young Andrew unwisely chose to hold it in place with some red clay when Scotch tape proved ineffective).

As messed up as this old handheld is, it still powers on if you snap four AA batteries into the back. That murky green screen is as difficult to see as ever, and next to an iPhone or 3DS XL, it looks very much like the relic of the 1980s that it is. Despite these shortcomings, I probably logged more hours with the old Game Boy than I have with any subsequent video game system (though my first DS Lite could probably at least give it a run for its money). There were those long, Tetris and Kirby's Dream Land-fueled car trips spent trying angle the screen toward the sun. There were Saturday mornings given over to playing Link's Awakening or Wario Land in bed. There was that first Pokemon game, played with the volume all the way down so no one would pay attention to what I was doing.

It's pretty easy to be spoiled by modern technology—even a $25 smartphone is exponentially more powerful and capable than the old Game Boy. But these modern handhelds owe a lot to the original Game Boy, the earliest portable system to strike that elusive balance between features, price, performance, size, and battery life given the limitations of the technology of the day. If you make anything with a battery and a screen, it's a balance you're still trying to strike today.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl